Rose's Last Summer

by Margaret Millar

  “To Murphy?”

  “Not to Murphy. To her. Willett’s mother.”

  “You’d better call Greer right away and ask for police protection.”

  “Police protection? What good will that do?”

  “They can put guards around the house.”

  “Guards around the house. That’s funny.” She began to laugh quietly to herself, her head bent, her hands cupped over her eyes as if she was looking down into some private joke.

  Frank touched her shoulder. “Stop that.”

  “It’s funny.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “You wouldn’t know. Guards around the house. They could put a million guards around the house. You can’t guard something that isn’t there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Willett’s mother was kidnapped,” Ethel said. “Last night. Drugged and taken right out of her bed. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Call the police.”

  “I can’t. They’ll never bring her back alive.”

  Frank didn’t say what he was thinking—that she might not be alive to bring back. “Has any ransom been asked?”

  “Asked?” Ethel repeated shrilly. “We’ve already paid it. This morning. That’s where we were, leaving the money where they told us. Everything happened so quick. Every­thing was so quick and yet so planned and deliberate. Even the amount of money they asked for—it was the exact amount we had in the house. Don’t you see? It must be someone who knows us, who knows how Willett feels about his mother—someone who may be watching me right this minute. I don’t know what to do.”

  This time Frank didn’t tell her what to do. He did it himself, went inside the house and phoned Greer.

  18

  Greer arrived as unobtrusively as possible, by the back road, in an old grey sedan that belonged to one of his sergeants. But in spite of the secrecy the news leaked out that there were policemen around the big house; and where there were policemen there was trouble; and where there was trouble was the place to be.

  Maids abandoned their ironing. Gardeners threw down their spading forks. Housewives removed their aprons, applied a dash of lipstick and left junior in the playpen. The mailman paused on his rounds and the music box tinkle of the Good Humor truck stopped in the middle of a waltz. Small boys appeared out of improbable places car­rying cap pistols and model airplanes and fat, moist snails and surprised grasshoppers.

  For the second time within a week the Goodfield gar­den came alive with people. They stood in sedate groups and exchanged the wildest rumors in the most plausible manner. The man of the house had gone berserk, stran­gled his wife and children and shot himself. (Several peo­ple had heard the shot, though there was some discrepancy about the time, which ranged from the preceding after­noon to seven o’clock that morning.) There had been a rape, a robbery, a suicide, an explosion. Mr. Goodfield was a well-known mobster (anybody could tell by looking at him), or a banker (same reason). His wife was an ex-burlesque queen (that bleached hair and slinky walk), a society woman (the postman had seen her picture in a newspaper), or a hosiery clerk (one of the housewives had seen a very fair-haired woman working in the hosiery department at Magnin’s, and this woman was probably Ethel who had been forced to take a job to pay off the debts of her husband, who was a well-known gambler, as anybody could tell by looking at him).

  None of the rumors came close to the story that Willett told Greer. They were in old Mrs. Goodfield’s bedroom, Greer pacing the floor and Willett standing in the door­way, his eyes fixed rigidly on the empty bed. From the broken French door that led out to the sundeck a cool fresh wind swept across the room, but the odor of ether still clung to the corners, subtle and tenacious as spider webs. On one jagged edge of the glass door a piece of blue silk was blowing in the breeze like a tiny flag. Greer had noticed the silk but he’d left it, as he’d left everything else in the room, untouched. A special F.B.I, unit was on its way from Los Angeles, and Greer was experienced enough to realize that this unit would handle the physical evidence much better than he could. Psychological evidence was a different matter. The piece of silk was for the specialists; the effect of the piece of silk on Willett was Greer’s busi­ness.

  “I guess—I guess it’s part of her nightgown.” Willett took out a handkerchief and wiped his face, but within a minute it was damp again. “How did it—how could it get there?”

  “I presume she was given the ether while she was asleep—not much sign of a struggle—and then carried out to the sundeck. Her nightgown caught on a piece of glass where the door was broken so it could be unlocked.”

  “She would have, surely she would have wakened up when the glass was broken.”

  “Maybe she did.”

  “She would have screamed for help.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “What does—what are you implying?”

  “She and Murphy,” Greer said, “got along very well, didn’t they?”

  “Mother despised Murphy.”

  “Your wife doesn’t think so.”

  “Take her word for it then. I don’t see why you’re both­ering me with these details when Ethel has already told you everything.”

  “I’d like to hear your version.”

  “Version,” Willett bleated. “My God, man, this isn’t the kind of thing you have versions of. I can tell you the facts.”

  “All right.”

  Willett’s facts were, with a few exceptions, the same as Ethel’s.

  He had last seen his mother the preceding evening, Wil­lett said, between nine and ten o’clock. She was feeling somewhat depressed and wanted to be left alone. (“She was in a bitchy mood,” Ethel had said, “and told us both to get out and stay out.”) At midnight when Willett and Ethel went upstairs to retire, they knocked at Mrs. Goodfield’s door intending to say good night. Her door was locked and they presumed she was asleep. There had been no unusual odor in the hall at that time.

  During the night Jack arrived.

  “We had a drink and a little chat and then we all went to bed.”

  “That isn’t quite what your wife—”

  “Ethel,” Willett said, “exaggerates.”

  “Oh.”

  “Besides, Jack had nothing to do with this affair, this kidnapping.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “His arrival was pure coincidence.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Naturally you don’t know Jack.”

  “Naturally. But I know Murphy, and I’ll eat my badge if Murphy was strong enough to carry a drugged woman out of that door and down that ladder. If Murphy is at the bottom of this, she’s sharing the bottom with somebody else.”

  “Not Jack. I mean—great Scott, chaps don’t go around kidnapping their own mothers. Murder, now that might make sense. I’ve often thought of—But that’s getting off the subject.”

  “All right,” Greer said. “You went to bed. Then what?”

  “We got the phone call. That is, Ethel did; the upstairs phone is in her room. But the ringing woke me up, it was around seven o’clock, I think. I heard Ethel talking, argu­ing with someone. Arguing upsets me. I got up to put a stop to it. I found Ethel standing right in this doorway and there was a terrible smell of ether coming from some­where. ‘We’ve got to pay it,’ Ethel said. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I went into Mother’s room. It was just the way it is now and M-mother was gone.”

  Tears welled in Willett’s eyes, magnifying the irises so that they looked ready to pop out of their sockets. Greer wasn’t sure whether the tears were caused by mere annoy­ance or by genuine grief at his mother’s disappearance: the rejected boy crying for his mother who had died or been divorced or merely gone off to an early matinee at the Bijou. Greer wondered gravely if there would ever be any more matinees for Mrs. Goodfie
ld. Though he had spoken optimistically to Ethel and Frank and Willett, his own feeling was that the old lady was dead, that whoever conceived such a drastic plan in the first place would take drastic measures to avoid being caught. It was easier to dispose of a dead woman than to conceal a reluctant and protesting live one.

  “It was all so sudden,” Willett said. “So shockingly sud­den. The demand for ransom came before we even knew she’d been taken away. They asked for three thousand dol­lars.”

  “They?”

  “Murphy. Ethel said it sounded like Murphy, not the voice so much as the words. Murphy has a way of talking.”

  “What were her instructions?”

  “She said that my mother was in safe hands and would be returned, providing we paid the money promptly and didn’t inform the police or anyone else of her disappear­ance. Ethel agreed. She had to. She acted right—I don’t care what your viewpoint is—Ethel acted right.”

  Greer didn’t argue. “I hope so. The money was to be paid in cash?”

  “Yes.”

  “You had that much cash in the house?”

  “Exactly that much. I’d been to the bank yesterday afternoon and drawn it out to lend to Jack. He’d phoned me in the morning from San Francisco and asked me for a loan.”

  “Anybody else know about this?”

  “Ethel, of course. And my mother. Oh yes, and Shirley, I guess. She’s my younger sister.”

  “And Murphy?”

  “I didn’t confide in Murphy,” Willett said. “Ethel did sometimes, but not about important things like money. Just,” Willett added rather wistfully, “about things like me.”

  “Was Murphy in the house at the time the call came through from San Francisco?”

  “I think she was downstairs.”

  “There’s another telephone down there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I think we can assume that Murphy was listening in.”

  “I—yes. If you say so.”

  “Is something troubling you, Mr. Goodfield?”

  “I—it’s this damned smell. It’s making me ill.”

  “We can leave in a minute. First, I want to know if your mother ever used that desk in the corner.”

  The desk was very small, almost child-sized. On it was a bowl of faded iris dripping purple, a fountain pen with its top off, and a piece of paper that had been crumpled and smoothed out again. The paper bore the words, writ­ten in a shaky, hesitant hand: “I’m getting scared. I have a premonition.” The letters were crudely formed as if the person who’d written them had forgotten how to write correctly or had never learned.

  “She used the desk,” Willett said. “Sometimes she wrote letters, not often.”

  “Is this her handwriting? Please don’t touch the paper.”

  “I can’t tell. Her handwriting changed a lot during her illness. I—I suppose she wrote this, though I can’t under­stand why.”

  “Did she go in for premonitions?”

  “Premonitions, astrology, fad diets, anything to pass the time. She got bored lying in bed day after day.”

  “What would she have to be scared about?”

  “N-nothing.”

  “Were you and your wife and Murphy her sole contacts with the outside world?”

  “I don’t like the way you put that. You’re implying that Ethel and I are culpable. We’re not. But I know who is. I know whose fault it will be if my mother is never brought back alive. Your fault, Captain Greer. Yours alone.”

  “I don’t agree.”

  “You think Ethel and I were wrong to pay the money,” Willett said passionately. “Well, I think you were wrong to interfere like this, to spoil our chances.”

  “Cooperating with criminals is always wrong. I hope you don’t learn that the hard way, Mr. Goodfield.”

  Greer locked the bedroom. Then they went down the wide staircase together, walking in step but as far apart as possible, as if to emphasize their unity of purpose and their separateness of minds.

  “You paid the ransom,” Greer said, “at the time and place specified?”

  “Yes. Our instructions were very definite. We put the money in a paper bag, drove down to the breakwater and walked out about a third of the way. There’s a big rock there on the channel side covered with mussels. At exactly a quarter to eight I put the paper bag on

  the rock. The tide was coming in.”

  “The timing was very close.”

  “Very. We almost didn’t make it. No more than forty-five minutes elapsed from the time of the phone call till the time we left the money on the rock.” Willett leaned against the banister as if he found his body suddenly and intolerably heavy. “Even if we had wanted to—well, think it over a bit, we didn’t have time. Everything moved too fast, don’t you see?”

  Greer saw. Speed and moderation were the elements that made the kidnapping unusual and, possibly, success­ful. There had been none of the delays common to such cases:

  Willett and Ethel were not forced to wait for a ran­som note, raise a large amount of cash and then wait again for instructions about the payoff. Such delays would have given Willett a chance to think the matter over in a reasonable way. As it was, the ransom was already paid before he emerged from a state of shock, and the tide had covered the tracks and tracings of the kidnapper before anybody started to search for them.

  A neat and simple payoff. At seven-forty-five in the morning the breakwater was usually well-filled with peo­ple, mostly fishermen, men, women and children carrying their bait or their lunches in paper bags. One more paper bag, one more fisherman, would hardly attract attention. Was that fisherman Murphy? Everything pointed to her —her disappearance, the amount of money demanded, the voice on the phone, the knowledge of Willett’s psychology and the advantage taken of his weakness, the fact that the old lady had made no outcry—everything pointed, almost too clearly, to Murphy. Murphy was, Greer thought, too shrewd a woman to leave such a blazing trail, and besides, she was not strong enough to have handled the actual kid­napping by herself. There were two possibilities: either someone had helped her, or someone sufficiently intimate with her to share her knowledge of the Goodfields was using her as a dupe. But Murphy would never willingly be used as a dupe, she was more likely to use someone else; so Greer was left with the disturbing thought that Murphy, as well as the old lady, had been kidnapped. Yet this picture of Murphy as a victim was distorted in his mind because it did not coincide with his own impression of her.

  “Everything moved too fast,” Willett said again in an aggrieved tone as if speed was always being used unfairly against him in one way or another.

  He followed Greer into the dining room. The room was long and narrow with windows on three sides. The drapes were still drawn closely over two of the windows. The third was open and in front of it stood Ethel staring out at the people on the lawn, her face white with strain and anger. It was as if all her resentments—against the Goodfields, the doll factory, the police, the kidnappers, and, inevitably, Willett—had been fused together and were now directed against the curiosity-seekers in the yard.

  She spoke in a harsh voice, one hand pressing her throat. “Look at them. Look at them, ruining everything, not even knowing, not even caring. What do they expect, a floor show?—a hanging?”

  “I’ll send them away,” Greer said.

  “They won’t go.”

  “They might. I’ll give them a story. I only wish,” he added dryly, “that I could give them a story as good as some of the ones I get.”

  When he had gone Ethel looked at Willett. “What did he mean by that?”

  “How should I know?”

  “It sounded as if he thought we were lying.”

  “Well, weren’t we?”

  “I lied very little.” She watched Greer cross the lawn, and then she slanted the slats of the blind
so that Greer and the people were shut out and only the sun came in. “What do you think will happen if he finds out every­thing?”

  “You know what will happen. We’ll be ruined.”

  “Maybe it won’t be as bad as you—”

  “Don’t kid yourself, Ethel.”

  “Well, all right then, we’ll be ruined. If we’re going to be ruined anyway, let’s at least be cheerful about it. I can always go out “and take a job.” After a time she added wistfully, “Wouldn’t it be kind of fun, Willett, to start all over again, without the factory and your mother and Jack —just you and me—wouldn’t it be kind of fun?”

  Willett didn’t answer and Ethel interpreted his silence as acquiescence.

  “You’re not old, Willett. Why, you could even go out and learn a trade, be something real, like a carpenter, maybe. Your mother told me you always enjoyed ham­mering nails into things so maybe carpentry would be just—” She looked at his face and added hastily, “Well, of course you don’t have to be a carpenter, dear. There are lots of other things, a mechanic, or a bricklayer—Your mother said you were very neat about piling up your blocks when you were a boy, and piling bricks is practi­cally the same thing, isn’t it, except for the glue in be­tween?”

  “It’s not glue.”

  “Or a farmer, Willett. That’s it, we could have a dairy farm. You’ve always been very good with dogs and you could probably handle cows quite—You don’t like that idea, either?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Silly. Yes, I guess I am.” She stared at him, blankly, all her wistfulness gone and nothing in its place. “Wil­lett.”

  “I won’t listen to any more of this nonsense.”

  “I was just thinking, Willett,” she said very softly. “It just occurred to me, maybe they’ll teach you a trade in prison.”

  Willett’s plump face seemed to come apart like an over­done chicken at the touch of a fork. “They can’t send me to prison. They can’t send me to prison. Not unless—”

  “Not unless they send me, too? Oh, they will. I’m sure of that. Only I won’t mind it quite as much as you. I’ve been in prison for years, with a cantankerous old woman as warden and a nasty little doll factory as a whip.”